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Xonaly – Canada's Independent Search Engine

https://xonaly.com/
27•backlit4034•1h ago

Comments

Lyngbakr•32m ago
Something I couldn't find info about is how this is funded, given that it is ad free and doesn't sell user data. Is it supported by a nonprofit organisation or just paid for out of the developer's pocket?
cosmic_quanta•21m ago
This is a critical piece of information to convince me to switch to this.

I'm quite interested though!

Also, what's the context of "Built in Canada"? What's the point of mentioning this? Should I expect the results to be better for Canadian content?

mwillis•16m ago
I’d guess because Canadians often rely on American tech infrastructure by default, and current events are shining a light on the vulnerability inherent in that arrangement. It’s a line that speaks to a potential Canadian user base who doesn’t make a distinction among what’s tangled up in their web use.
cgh•15m ago
This is the founder: https://xonaly.com/about-the-founder/

I guess he’s psyched about being Canadian? Anyway, nothing about funding. The privacy-first stance is certainly welcome.

tiago-dot-dev•2m ago
It seems like it is funded by creator for now. It seems like they intend to fund it via professional acesa to its infrastructure.

Here is the bit that talks about it

https://xonaly.com/ethical-private-search-engine/

> How is Xonaly sustained? > Xonaly remains free and private for users by offering professional access to its infrastructure through the Xonaly API. This allows developers and organizations to build applications on top of a truly independent search engine, while supporting the long-term growth of the project.

Tiberium•27m ago
The search engine does indeed seem to be fully custom - the results for niche topics are quite bad, but that at least means it's not a Bing frontend, so it's forgivable. Although I wonder why the authors decided to go 100% custom instead of (partially?) reusing https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch for some of the core engine.

On an unrelated note: why do some people use LLMs to write all the text in their projects? As an example: https://xonaly.com/how-it-works - it's obvious that the text here is LLM-written, but I genuinely don't understand why. It's one of the pages linked directly from the home page, so it's quite important. At least personally, I always get very suspicious of any project that doesn't even bother to have some human-written content. (I know the whole website clearly looks LLM-authored, but I feel like it's not hard to add some human touch)

Don't get me wrong, I use LLMs myself quite a lot, but I try to always interact with others in my own words. In rare cases where I need to paste some output from an LLM, I always leave a note about it being AI-written.

Oh, and another funny tidbit I just found: https://xonaly.com/is-xonaly-legit/ repeats the same facts a lot. Ctrl+F "Canad", "independent": 10 results, "search engine": 17 results.

amatecha•21m ago
Nice. Submitted a few sites to bolster the "small hand-made personal sites" quotient a bit (all made by Canadian ppl fwiw) :)
Muhammad523•20m ago
I tought it was about to say "Canada's independent AI chatbot". Seeing that it is instead an old-fashioned search engine made me smile.
reassess_blind•18m ago
Funny, it sounds like “where is?” (zài nǎlǐ?) in Mandarin.
kps•2m ago
7 years since `:prefers-color-scheme` became widely supported.

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